Stuntsmen
by BookCreeper
Summary: Emery and Nico become great friends, but camp gets boring after a while. A presumably harmless stunt turns into a pretty darn big disaster.
1. Emery and the Demon Pigeon

Everyone likes a good adrenaline rush once in a while. They're not very hard to get, all you have to do is something slightly risky or dangerous to feel like a superhero. Most of the time, no one gets hurt, you don't get caught and everything turns out fine. You have a good story to tell your friends, you think of yourself with pride and the knowledge that you are a rebel. You hold a title.

But no one ever talks about those stunts that went awfully wrong. The ones that ended up failing miserably usually go on some fail video, accompanied by the usual angry parent or broken car. But people tend to keep their grief and regrets to themselves, and if a stunt brings you that, not many people are going to hear about it.

That's what happened to Emery Nelson and Nico di Angelo.

Emery was not your typical teen. For one thing, he didn't talk very much and had very little friends. He knew he had no one to blame but himself for that, but he liked the "mysterious kid" title that he had been given by numerous classmates. Another thing was his style. Emery had pastel purple hair and loved to wear combat boots, which isn't something you see every day in a fourteen-year-old boy. He didn't consider himself emo or gothic, but he liked to express himself through his fashion choices.

Lastly, Emery's father was a Greek god. He had only found this out two years prior when rescued from a sticky situation involving… mythological creatures, let's put it that way. By another person just like him. It had come as quite a shock, and the fact that he had to leave his mom for whole seasons at a time to go train himself against those creatures at a camp in Long Island was hard for him. But, if he were to survive, the girl who rescued him had told him, he had to train the best he could. And because he knew his mother would be devastated if he died, Emery agreed.

He didn't need to be there all the time, like some campers. His father wasn't a god that tended to give his children monster-magnets for body odor, thankfully. His father was Hermes, god of thieves and merchants. And travelers. And mail. And WiFi. Basically, it would have been faster to name the things Hermes wasn't the god of.

Of course, Emery knew something was odd about his family from an early age. First off, he didn't have any siblings, which is more or less uncommon. Secondly, he had never, ever seen his father. He had not heard his voice, smelled him or been able to tell which color were his eyebrows. Absolutely nothing.

His mother didn't help on that matter either. Every time he brought it up, she would get very angry and avoid the topic like meat (she was vegetarian). The first few times he had mentioned it, she had sent him to his room for no reason but had quickly apologized and warned him not to ask. But because Emery also considered himself an asshole, he had kept on asking, never yielding a different result. Soon after he gave that up, though, weird things started happening.

He was first attacked by a creature from Greek origins at the age of ten. There was this one, super annoying pigeon that kept on pooping in places Emery was most likely to step, and it always squawked when he needed to concentrate on something, not helping at all. He had been too young to realize that pigeons don't normally squawk and also don't normally have reflective feathers, but heck, he was just a kid, right?

Anyways, the pigeon had been doing this for about a week before it attacked. Emery had been in the play yard climbing on the monkey bars when it flew down and bit his finger.

Normally, he could have brushed something like this off, but it was _that pigeon_ so he was already angry even before it had decided to snack on his blood. He dropped down from the monkey bars and leaped unnaturally high, caught the pigeon by its metal foot- wait, metal foot?

Before he had time to process that, it had already escaped his grasp. So he lay there, on his knees, absolutely very confused until it came back for another bite at his flesh. This time, though, he was both angry and scared, because as ignorant as a ten year old should be, he knew that pigeons were not normally also cyborgs.

So he went with his instincts. He grabbed a branch from the nearest tree and ran forwards, turning around to look at where the demon pigeon was at now. He waited, waited, and swiftly scootched to the side. The branch backlashed and hit the pigeon full in the face.

Emery had then decided that the pigeon was not, in fact, a pigeon, but a metal toy. Its head was smashed in and its wings beating with no particular sense of direction, almost like a broken toy. So, he had grabbed it by its metal tail and threw it in the trash can. He had never told a soul.

Yeah. So that happened. Again. And again. Every time, though, it was a different creature; a tiny little pig with a tail made of thorns, a snake with two heads, and even a cat with rock-hard hair.

By the time these events evolved into something actually life-threatening, he had realized something was awfully wrong with his life, but being the silent kid he had always been, he had kept quiet until that girl saw him at it.

And by "at it", I mean full-blown fighting. That night, it had been the biggest creature he had ever encountered; it was both a crocodile and absolute darkness. It had the jaw and teeth of your everyday gator, but the rest of it was ever-lasting shadows, woven so tight together they formed claws, spikes, arrows, anything. He had been terrified but fought with all his strength in the only dark alley leading to his house. Fortunately, a girl of about sixteen years had run unto the scene, jabbed a pointy metal object at it and saved Emery who had been very badly hurt at the time. And that was when his career as a demigod officially started.

Now, back to where I was at the beginning of the story, where I was talking about stunts and how they can sometimes go wrong. Usually, you need two people to get the most out of a dangerous activity, right? Well, when Emery woke up at this mystical demigod training camp, built specifically for the children of both gods and "mortals", or, normal human beings, he made his first ever real friend a few months later. His name was Nico.

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 **This is one of my first stories, I honestly hope this chapter was an OK first chapter, feel free to tell me what you thought of it! I'll try my best to update this weekly. Thank.**


	2. The Climbing Wall

Emery had met Nico di Angelo during a deadly session of lava-wall climbing. Since he was his first real friend, he remembered that day better than any other.

The lava-wall was situated in a clearing in a forest with a great view of the lake from the top - that is, if you even made it up there at all. The walls were solid, slippery obsidian and sometimes scalding hot lava poured out of holes hidden here and there, and if you didn't make it up fast enough, the walls shook and threatened to pitch you into the deep pool of water below. Emery had been told that it had been actual lava a few years before until the camp staff had decided that was a little extreme and replaced it with water. But of course, they still had to have some reason to not want to fall into it, so they decided to dye it green.

Not with regular dye, though. Dye that stained you and your clothes for a week, so you walked around looking like a morph between a human being and a leaf.

The two boys stood quite far away, avoiding having to talk to each other, while also avoiding the crowds of people on the other wall. In Emery's point of view, the boy to his left looked threatening in his own way; his skinny figure, pale skin and dark eye circles made him look slightly mad, but in a genius sort of way. Someone who stayed up all night making evil plans and hid in the shadows, watching, waiting. He had been at the furthest corner of the wall, so nobody would have noticed him if they hadn't been looking. But Emery was always looking.

Now back to Nico's point of view. He had glanced to his right vaguely and noticed someone separate from the group of people further on that seemed like the kind of person who could pose a threat if they weren't on your side. They were obviously very aware of their surroundings, as if expecting an attack, and observant of every little detail any other camper wouldn't have noticed; Nico had observed how they analyzed the climbing wall before actually getting on. When they actually got on the wall and started climbing, reaching the top amazingly quickly, he was amazed; he had never seen them before and assumed they were a first-timer. It was only when Nico started climbing that things went badly.

Nico had gotten on at the same time as an older camper from the group further away, a child of Apollo, meaning, a child of the god of the actual sun. But, he knew that the camper, a girl named Alice, wasn't the best at climbing and had come for practice before supper time. But by the time he made that realization, both his feet had left the floor and it vanished into that green water-pool. He had to get to the top before Alice made the wall shake; his hidden corner was the worst place to be in that scenario.

He climbed as fast as he had ever climbed before, shoving his hands and feet into any hole he could find, trying desperately to reach the top where the respectable climber was enjoying the view.

That, he realized soon enough, had been a mistake. He had put his hand in a hidden lava-hole.

"Agh!" He screamed as some of it spilled onto his hand, so hot it felt freezing. He frantically shook his hand, but it was still burning hot. He had to get to the top, quick.

He tried to climb with only his left hand but it was impossible. The walls were already starting to shake and he heard a surprised gasp from Alice, who was still only a third of the way to the top. He frantically searched for a bigger foothold, and when he looked up again, he was surprised to see a hand reaching up to him.

The walls were shaking violently now, and more holes had started pouring lava. Desperate, he jumped up as high as was possible while climbing a vertical cliff, his left hand leaving the handhold as he reached as far up as he could.

For a scary moment, he didn't think he would reach the person, whoever they were, who was trying to help him out. He was at the highest his momentum could bring him and was about to go back down again into the green water that left his pale skin particularly greener for longer. But amazingly, the person on top of the wall reached down further and grabbed his hand.

Furiously kicking upwards at the wall that was now shaking as if there were an earthquake, Nico scrambled up and stood in the centermost spot of the plateau, where he was the least likely to fall of while the ground shook.

"Thank you-" he started, looking up at the boy who had helped him make it up. It was him who had been avoiding the others as well, the person he had watched climb the wall with incredible speed. He had never seen him up close before, even though he was hard to miss. His hair was pastel purple and he was dressed in black from head to toe. His Walking Dead shirt was a little torn in some places but his jeans were obviously ripped on purpose. He was wearing dark grey Vans that looked pretty beaten up.

Nico frowned. This guy dressed similar to him, looked slightly like him except for the hair, which was still long and tousled, except… He was very small. Probably not taller than 5 feet.

"No problem" he answered shyly. "Uh, your hand…"

Nico looked down onto his right hand. It looked very badly burnt and was still throbbing, but otherwise he was fine. Looking up at the boy, he noticed that there wasn't a speck of the obsidian dust on him except for his fingers. It was very hard to climb the wall and still look like that at the end; most people were dark with soot and sweaty.

"It's nothing, Will- the people at the infirmary," he corrected himself, "can fix it right up," he finished.

"Are you sure? How are you gonna get back down?" the boy asked even more shyly.

"There's a ladder hidden in the back, not many people know about it but it's there. What's your name?" Nico asked.

"Um, Emery" he responded. "What about you?"

"I'm Nico." he answered, holding out his hand. Emery shook it uncertainly, his left arm twitching forward but then holding out his right arm. He was left-handed like Nico. How similar could he get? He thought.

"Right, well, the ladder's this way, let me show you…" Nico said as he started walking towards a corner of the top of the climbing wall, thinking about how he would be leaf green right now if it weren't for Emery.

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 **This chapter was extremely edited from its original form, I may have made some editing mistakes and repetitions that might make it hard to read, my apologies!**


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